If you were Channel 4, when would you broadcast a documentary called Let the Music Play: The Barry White Story? Logically, you would opt for that pink, fluffy day in February when all the world lights its scented candles and cranks up its copy of Barry White's Greatest Hits. But, in perhaps the most misjudged piece of scheduling so far this year, the station showed it last night. The day after Valentine's Day!

I can only assume C4 decided that a mega-dose of Barry on February 14 would have been hazardous to health. For singletons, Valentines is tedious enough without Bazza hammering home the message that you're nobody till somebody loves you. And for those who spent all of Wednesday basking in happily-partnered yuckiness, the sight of White would have blown those overworked hormones to smithereens. So, all things considered, it's just as well that the show was saved until yesterday.

Of course, it's all too easy to dismiss White as nothing more than an enormous Cupid, or a well-fed Romeo, especially because he himself colluded in that impression. In his 1999 autobiography, Love Unlimited: Insights on Life and Love, he claimed that at age 14, he was already acting as a marriage counsellor to neighbourhood couples. And by the time his great run of 70s hits ended, he occupied a niche of his own making: the Love Guru, the Walrus of Love. The persona was so ripe for parody it inspired Lenny Henry's Theophilus P Wildebeest creation which satirised White's supposed affinity with the cheesy side of romance.

If White felt regret at not being taken seriously, he might have blamed Mother Nature, who endowed him with a physique and a voice that left him with almost no choice but to become a Love Guru. But in a musical sense he was far more than that. He was an orchestra leader, musician, film scorist, producer and songwriter, and he was underrated in each area. Here are a few of his accomplishments:

1. He developed the concept of the disco instrumental with the worldwide hit single Love's Theme.

2. On his first album, I've Got So Much to Give, he was confident enough to present just five lushly-wrought tracks, rather than the 10 that were the norm on LPs.

3. His funk grooves, quietly chugging away under the orchestral gloss, helped set the musical agenda for the first half of the 70s.

What more proof that the Walrus of Love was also the Genius of 70s Pop?